Small snack food products have been manufactured in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, including scoops, cups, containers, cones, triangles, roll, squares and curls. Corn chips and potato chips are generally planar, concave or ridged. Pretzels are long, short, thick or thin, and twisted into a variety of shapes.
Snack food products have been made from masa in the past, but the masa has been made in a conventional manner by grinding. Grinding is traditional, but produces masa having coarse particle sizes because all attempts to produce very fine particle sizes by grinding generate enough frictional heat so that the masa will become overly cooked. This has led the public to expect certain mouth-feel and texture characteristics in snack products produced from masa.
Corn has also been processed for use in making snacks on comminution devices, such as Fitz mills or hammermills, with a cutting action that reduce particle size by a cutting action rather than by a grinding action. Generally, the product of such a process is a masa of reduced cohesion between its particles that results in a characteristic mouth-feel and texture in products made from this kind of material.
Prior art processes for manufacturing corn flour or corn chip snack products are also varied. These processes all have at least one grinding step.
Often the manufacturer of a snack food product will begin the manufacturing process with a prepared flour or meal, which is used to form a dough, masa, or the like. In this case, the manufacturer has no concern, generally, with the initial material, but contributes to the product just the formulation and manufacturing steps that utilize the flour or meal as a raw material. Where the manufacturer does produce the flour or meal, it is generally produced by a grinding, cutting, or attrition step. Since each of these processes requires a different piece of equipment, generally only one type of operation is performed.